Thursday, January 29, 2015

(From Wikipedia) Epistemology (ἐπιστήμη, episteme-knowledge, understanding; λόγος, logos-study of) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge[1][2]and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge". Put concisely, it is
the study of knowledge and justified belief. It questions what knowledge
is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge
pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired. (image source)

A few weeks ago, someone barreled into the comment section of a post on climate change on the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry (SCI) with a series of attacks against climate science and climate scientists. The ensuing clash was all in Italian but, if you follow the debate on climate, you know very well how these things go. The newcomer monopolized the discussion by repeating the usual legends; climate has always been changed, there has been no temperature increase during the past 15 years, there is no proof of the human effect on climate, and so on. And you can imagine how the scientists following the blog reacted. The discussion rapidly degenerated into assorted insults and personal smears, until the moderator closed the comments. That was way too late: the climate science denier emerged as the winner; while the scientists managed to give the impression of being both narrow-minded and sectarian.

It was a classic case of climate trolling, but with one difference. This time, the troll didn't try to hide his identity (as trolls usually do); rather, he came with a name, an address, and a CV. He was Mr. Rinaldo Sorgenti, vice-president of the Italian Coal Industry Association ("Assocarboni"). Mr. Sorgenti's exploits on the SCI blog give us a chance to understand what generates the kind of behavior that we define as "trolling."

So, I am willing to bet that Mr. Sorgenti is NOT a paid disinformer - as he was accused to be in the debate. In other words, he doesn't deny climate science because he is on the payroll of Assocarboni (actually, he maintains that he gets no money for his position of vice-president, but I figure he gets at least a few perks from it). I would also say that not even the opposite holds true: Mr. Sorgenti is not the president of Assocarboni because he is a climate science denier. No, I would bet that denying climate science and being involved in the coal industry are two non-separate and non-separable elements of Mr. Sorgenti'sworldview. And this worldview has little or nothing to do with what we call science. Mr. Sorgenti is not a scientist, he doesn't know how the scientific method works or, if he knows, he doesn't believe it works or it is useful for anything. He uses the methods of debate commonly used in the political debate; a method of discussion that we can define as "rhetoric."

Mr. Sorgenti's case is not isolated. Over several years of debate (if we may call it in this way), I came in contact with a number of people who can be defined as "trolls" or "deniers". Most of them (including Mr. Sorgenti) believe (genuinely, I think) that you can use the methods of the political debate to arrive to a conclusion on a complex and difficult scientific field
such as climate science; and they resent being shortly dismissed by scientists. Scientists know how much work and study is needed to
understand climate science and resent what they saw as superficiality
and approximation in the debate. The result is the kind of clash we saw on the SCI blog. It was, if you like, a clash of epistemologies: rhetoric against the scientific method.

As in all clashes of absolutes, debaters think they are speaking the same language and they start from the same assumptions, but they are not. The problem is identified by Adam Dawson on "The Ruminator"in these terms:

..... you have to understand that in America there are two different types of
science. There’s science that is profitable for corporations, which is
good and righteous and rock solid. That’s the Smartphone, the water
heater, the GPS, the 700 channels on the 62 inch flat screen, the boner
pills, and so on and so on. And then there’s the science that costs
corporations money, which is fraudulent, con-artist mumbo jumbo. Under
that second definition are things like climatology, pollution
measurements, oceanography, and other disciplines that might fuck up the
profit margins of energy producers and manufacturers.

I think Dawson is right on target about the "two different types of science", but the point is not so much that some types science cost corporations money. Science and technology push for change and change often means that someone will lose money, but that doesn't mean that change is impossible. The Internet, for instance, is bankrupting newspapers, but the newspaper lobby doesn't appear to be very effective in stopping the Internet from expanding. Rather, the fundamental point is that scientific fields such as climate science use different methods for gathering data and managing knowledge than, say, the science of solid state devices. It is an epistemological difference: the kind of certainty that can be derived from a well designed laboratory experiment performed on a solid state device is not possible in climate science.

The different epistemological approach becomes really fundamental when it is question to implement a policy based on the result of the models. Climate scientists mostly agree that there is no simple technological remedy to avoid disastrous climate change. Then, what we are proposing is not hard engineering, but some kind of social engineering based on a general consensus that the danger of climate change is real. Now, how do we obtain such a consensus? To start, we need to share the basic assumptions on how the conclusions of climate science are obtained and validated; this is a question of epistemology. And when we deal with social matters, the traditionally accepted methods of attaining knowledge (and consensus) are not based on the scientific method. The debate becomes political, and the methods used for political debates are completely different. As I said, it is a clash of epistemologies.

In many ways, we seem to be learning to use different epistemological methods in the climate debate: have you noticed the claim that there exists a "97% consensus" among scientists on the climate problem? It has had a remarkable impact; considering how rabidly it has been criticized on the deniers' side. But can you think of a single case in the history of science when a scientific controversy has been subjected to a majority vote? Never that I know. In science, we believe that the scientific method is sufficient to arrive at a consensus. Political controversies are a different thing; data and interpretations are much more uncertain; hence the need for a vote.

I am not saying that science should turn into a political organization. It is already something, however, that we
recognize what we are dealing with: it is a political debate, not a scientific one. And we need to recognize that to stiffen up
and look offended when someone belittles climate science is not useful. Even worse is to state that someone is a paid disinformer
because he is not using the scientific method. We need to be way smarter
than that if we want to go somewhere in fighting climate change.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Once you start looking for "Seneca Cliffs" in the exploitation of natural resources, you find them all over the scientific literature. This is my latest find of a production curve where decline is much more rapid than growth: the landings of sandeels. If you don't know what a sandeel is, here is one:

In the report (2007), where I found the curve shown above, the authors discuss the causes for the collapse of the fishery, especially in view of climate change. They don't seem to arrive to any definitive conclusion and they don't use the dreaded term "overfishing". But from the fact that trawlers were used in this fishery, I think it is clear that the fish stock was being destroyed in a process similar to the one that led to the collapse of the whole UK fishing industry. The more resources were aggressively thrown at trying to maintain production, the more the fish stock was depleted. The end result was the rapid collapse observed.

So, as in several other cases, we have a classic example of the "Seneca Collapse",
that is a production curve where decline is much more rapid than
growth. Below, you can see the Seneca curve as shown in a simulation carried out by system dynamics that takes into account the increased capital expenditure in fishing equipment (the model is described here).

This post was originally published on "Dictionary of Decline" on July 21, 2014

The Other Side of The Mountain

In the song "Susann" by Toni Vescoli (people in Germany might recall the
cover version by Reinhard Mey), a young woman, fed up with her boring life in the
countryside, decides to move to the city. She gets herself a job and becomes a true
and content city dweller. Until, one day, her boyfriend comes home with a triumphant
smile and declares that his lifetime dream has finally come true: he has bought a
farmhouse and they will move there to escape this dull city life! This sums up nicely the universal pattern of modern life: we want change. It is not so
much a question of where we are or whether life is good. After a while, we get bored
and want to move on.

Our dissatisfaction is growing and we start to dream of a different
and of course better world, where all our problems simply do not exist.Every dream that we have can turn into an obsession — which lasts until the dream
comes true. Reinhold Messner in one of his darker moments said that every mountain conquered
is a dream gone forever.

The same holds true of societies as a whole. They dream about the future and what it
will bring them. A hundred years ago, for example, future was hoped to end diseases, hard
labour, poverty, and hunger. Mankind would excel not only in arts, but also in science.
And we would travel not only anywhere on earth but eventually also go into space.

And we did.

Only that once these dreams came true, we got to see the other side of them, too.
Some hundred years ago, longevity had been a dream. Today we hear about a growing
problem of Alzheimer or similar diseases of the ageing body. Or we see people lying
in hospital connected to ever more machines. To live on is not always a dream come
true. It may for some also be a nightmare.

Or think about the space that we have given to cars so that they can move us where we
want to go. When I was a child, there was hardly a car around in our little street, and
we roamed the street on roller skates. Today, this same street is filled with cars. So many,
that they can't even get past each other on encounter. And there are no children.

The Desire to Learn

When the dreams are no longer there or have turned into nightmares, when the people
do not know what to really aspire for the first that happens is that there no longer
is a desire by the next generation to learn anything. Because what would be the result
of learning? What is the direction they should take if we don't know it ourselves?

Indeed, this is our great dilemma. While we have lost direction ourselves, we wish for
the next generation to find out where to go. We see what we have done, and we ask
ourselves: was it worth the effort? We see what the world has become and we ask:
where is the future? But the next generation cannot be the future if we do not do
out part.

I have long thought that today's children have stopped learning because of the
affluence. Or because of the long term effects of a libertarian society (as
Plato proposed). But now I think that affluence isn't what has stopped them. Young
children are still eager to learn. It is not until they reach a certain age when they
change their mind about their goals.

One may think: maybe it is just an effect of adolescence. But remember the desire
for learning used to return once the problems in our heads got sorted out. Because
when we understood our place in society there were signs and directions all around
us. They said: study hard, become a scientist, a programmer, a doctor, and life
will be very interesting. Not only will you get a job, it will also be interesting,
useful, and rewarding. They said: practice an instrument and you can perform music.
You can become popular, even famous. They said: if you want and work for it, there
will be a place for you.

That is no longer true. Not only are the dreams failing us. There are no true dreams
left. We are dropping them one by one.

It happens to all of us. But we don't like to talk about it.

Why become a scientist if all science does is prepare the ground for the destruction of
the planet? Name one invention that has not been perverted to make money rather than
being used for the benefit of mankind.

It doesn't have to be genetics or nuclear physics. Anything, I repeat: anything, is
being turned into money. And nothing besides that is left to dream of.

Who is dreaming of playing music? Who is dreaming of becoming a singer (as opposed
to becoming rich and famous)? Who is in it for the beauty?

Or take foreign languages. What is the point of learning any language other than
English? When people talk about internationalisation what they really mean is:
Anglicization. Because that is what you need to make a living. Give English names
to things and you are there. You are international. Foreign languages are no longer
important in themselves or as a means to understand other cultures, but as a means
of being economically successful. Which leaves more or less one language worth the
effort of learning it.

Or take machines. Of course, we need engineers to make them. But where is the
attitude that engineering is actually fun? It is gone. And, really, most factories
are dead places. Full of robots. Sure, they need designing, but that too is increasingly
a sterile job. The engineer hardly gets to touch the thing he is making. Instead, he
is assembling them behind a screen, like a programmer.
Not to speak of programming itself. That too has become more of an assembly-line job.
The spirit's gone.

Education

And so the students arrive at university without dreams except for a single one: to get
a diploma so that they can get a job — and make money. And why shouldn't they want
that if this is what society tells them to do?

The belief that society values science is pure hallucination. It values only the money
that the science is asked to deliver. Why else are universities under constant threat
to get in money regardless of the content of the research? Why do the criteria of
success for German universities talk about anything but content?

Think this: the majority of people in Europe (and, as I read somewhere, also in the US)
do not want genetically modified food. And yet they are being told that they
have to accept it. And they are told that they have to accept it because there is no
scientific proof of its adverse effects. As if it were a simple matter to stop this
food once we know what these effects are. This is not only hard to accept in a democratic
society. My question is: why do all this science, then? Apparently it is not being done so
that in the end society gets to choose and say what it really wants to have. It is there for
certain institutions to make money from it. Pure and simple.

It means that if you are against the abuse of science your only safe bet is not to
become a scientist.
The logic of money is everwhere. Is it not natural that students say: I am doing all
this to make money, all I want from my degree is a job? If we want them to change
their minds, we should change ours first. But we are not. Instead we are dabbling
on about changing the learning habits.

Different recipes have been tried to stem the tide. In the US, rising costs have led
to fee hikes, and students are more and more in debt. Which will focus their attention
even more on the question of where the money is in their education.

In Europe, one has tried to standardise education. Students get credit points, which
supposedly are uniform in value. Universities however are subjected to a quasi-market
oriented regime where they get part of their funding according to performance. Performance
in turn is measured by some bureaucratic numbers. In Germany they are: number of first degrees,
amount of extra mural funding, and progress in equal oportunity hiring. None are
about content or quality of teaching.

None of these approaches have worked. It is not because the students are protesting.
They in fact are very polite. But typically they are absent minded. The content is
not what they are in for. They are asking: what do I have to know to pass the exam?

The politicians and presidents of the universities alike talk about performance but
they hardly mean content. They mean money. In other areas of life you call that
prostitution. It results in getting a mere substitute for what you really want.
Because what you really want you cannot get by paying money.

Motivation is a primadonna. It is not singing when you want it to. It disappears
once you start asking too loudly for it.

If I want my students to listen, I need to give them a story of why
it makes sense to do what I am doing. Why I am doing it despite everything.

The Road Ahead

But not only the students need dreams to carry on. All of us need them.
I need to have a dream as well. I need to know why I am doing what I am
doing.

Increasingly however I am getting tired. The administration is turning academic life
into a madhouse. We get no time to think, because that is something that can't be
measured. No credit points for thinking. And we are losing hope that the next generation
will have any chances to get a meaningful job in society let alone at a university.
Higher education is at a crossroads, really. It needs money, and the money isn't there.
To cover that up, they are making up excuses. That's it.

Increasingly, I see myself doing research not for a future generation (who would that
be?) but for the people with whom I went to university. Because there hardly is a next
generation. Jobs are being cut, university life is being stripped down to the barest
necessities. The propaganda has it that there is less money because people aren't working
hard enough, but that's not how the bureaucratic machine functions. Remember that awards
are relative: you get more if you are better than the rest. If everyone works more, you
have to work more just to stay even with them. And if they start working less, then less
work on your part will also do.

Universities will become marginalised. Already the discussion of what its role in
society is or should be is nonexistent. Because interference with politics is not
desired. Intellectuals do not appear in television for fear that what they will be
saying is too difficult. Their role is not any more to come up with a beautiful story
but to get money in. So universities turn into private companies for funding.

And the
state nods in agreement.

The dream of learning has disappeared from higher education. Yes, more and more students
enroll in first tier institutions (high schools, universities), but less and less of them
do it because they want to learn. Call that realism. I call it a wasted chance.

At one point the money will be so scarce that they start closing down universities.
And we get to see the other side of Big Education.

Once you have given a name to a phenomenon and understood its causes, you can use it as a guide to understanding many other things. So, the concept of the "Seneca Cliff" tells us that the overexploitation of natural resources often leads to an abrupt decline that, often, takes people by surprise. In the case of biological resources, such as fisheries, the decline may be so fast and uncontrollable that it leads to the extinction or to the near extinction of the species being exploited. It has happened, for instance, for whales in 19th century and for the Atlantic cod.

If you keep in mind these historical examples, you can examine other cases and identify possible Seneca cliffs in the making. One such case is the ivory trade from the hunting of African elephants. If you look at the plots (from a recent paper), above, you see that the seized ivory mass has shown a considerable increase starting around 2008. It peaked in 2011, then declined. We can probably take these numbers as a "proxy" for the number of African elephants being killed - which is also visible as the red line in the upper box.

This is very worrisome, because if killings decline, it may very well be because there are fewer elephants left to kill - just as the landings of the fishing industry tend to decline when the fish stocks are depleted. Considering how abruptly these things go (the "Seneca effect") then we may well be seeing a similar trend in progress for African elephants: that is, the prelude of an abrupt crash in their numbers. Considering that elephants are big and reproduce slowly, that may very well lead to their extinction.

On this subject, the authors of the paperseem to be very worried, too. The title, by itself, says it all: "Illegal killing for ivory drives global decline in African elephants". In the text, we can read, among other things, that:

The population [of African elephants] was subjected to unsustainable rates of illegal killing between 2009 and 2012, escalating from a mean of 0.6% (SD = 0.4%) between 1998 and 2008 to a high of 8% in 2011 (Fig. 1). Annual illegal killing of elephants in the Samburu population during 2009 to 2012 exceeded those of all previous years of monitoring (1998–2008) with an estimated aggregate of 20.8% of the known elephants illegally killed during that 4-y period. ... Illegal killing rates were strongly correlated with black market ivory prices in the Samburu ecosystem. ... As a result of this illegal killing, the population currently suffers from few prime-aged males, strongly skewed sex ratios, and social disruption in the form of some collapsed families and increased numbers of orphans (immature elephants without a parent)

Are we going to lose the elephants forever? Right now, we can't say for sure; but when it will be clear that it is happening, it will probably be too late to do something about it. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Sunday, January 18, 2015

In a previous post titled "Where have our dreams gone?", I argued that literature, as well as other forms of art, has declined starting with the 1980s, losing impact and interest in our society. This, of course, can only be a qualitative evaluation and it was challenged in some of the comments. Indeed, terms such as "impact" and "interest" can only be defined in qualitative terms and there is plenty of space for different interpretations.

Nevertheless, I did some experimenting on google's "Ngrams" and I think that my interpretation is shared by many others. You can see in the figure above, showing a clear peak for the term "novel" (*), around 1990 indicating a decline of interest in novels. Also this result is debatable, of course, but I think it does tell us something about the general cultural decline of our civilization.

(*) One problem with this search is that the term "novel" in English may also be an adjective, but the peak is visible also with unambiguous terms such as "novelist" and "novel", although in both cases it appears earlier. Also, in Italian, the term "romanzo" for "novel" is unambiguous, and it shows a similar peak - even clearer - as for "novel" in English.

Friday, January 16, 2015

The novel by Vladimir Dudintsev "Not by bread alone" was published in 1956 (*). It was a big hit in the Soviet Union with its criticism of the stagnating and inefficient Soviet ways. Together with other Russian authors, such as Vasily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dudintsev was part of a wave of novelists who tried to use literature to change the ways of society. That kind of approach seems to have withered out, both in the countries of the old Soviet Union and in the West.

At some moment, between the second and the third century AD, the Latin literature died out in the Roman Empire. Not that people stopped writing; on the contrary, the late Western Roman Empire saw a minor revival of Latin Literature; it was just that they didn't seem to have anything interesting to say any more.

If we consider the high times of the Empire, around the first century BC, it is likely that most of us would be able to come up with at least some names of literates of that time: poets such as Virgil and Horace, philosophers like Seneca, historians like Tacitus. But move to the late centuries of the Western Empire and chances are that you won't be able to come up with any name, unless you read Gibbon and you remember that he cites the 4th century poet Ausonius to evidence the bad taste of those times. It seems that the Roman Empire had lost its soul much before having disappeared as a political organization.

Often, I have the impression that we are following the same path to collapse that the Roman Empire followed, but faster. Ask yourself this question: can you cite a recent (intended as less than - say - 10-20 years old) piece of literature that you think posterity will remember? (and not as an example of bad taste). Personally, I can't. And I think that it could be said that literature in the Western world declined in the 1970s or so and that today is not a vital form of art any longer.

Of course, perceptions in these matters may be very different, but I can cite plenty of great novels published during the first half of the 20th century; novels that changed the way people looked at the world. Think of the great season of the American writers in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; think of Hemingway, of Fitzgerald, of Gertrude Stein and many others. And of how American literature continued to produce masterpieces, from John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac and others. Now, can you cite a later equivalent American writer? Think of a great writer suchas John Gardner, who wrote in the 1970s and is today mostly forgotten. Something similar seems to have taken place on the other side of the Iron Curtain; where a number of gifted Soviet writers (Dudintsev, Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, and others) produced a literary corpus in the 1950s and 1960s that strongly challenged the Soviet orthodoxy and played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But there doesn't seem to exist anything comparable any more in Eastern European countries that could compare with those novels.

It is not just a question of written literature; visual arts seem to have gone through the same withering process: think of Picasso's Guernica (1937) as an example. Can you think of anything painted during the past few decades with an even remotely comparable impact? About movies, which ones were really original or changed our perception of the world? Maybe with movies we are doing better than with written literature; at least some movies didn't go unnoticed, even though their literary merits are questionable. Think of "The night of the living dead", by George Romero, which goes back to1968 and has generated a tsunami of imitations. Think of "Star Wars" (1977), which shaped an entire strategic plan of the US military. But during the past decade or so, the film industry doesn't seem to have been able to do better than hurling legions of zombies and assorted monsters at the spectators.

Not that we don't have bestsellers any more, just as we have blockbuster
movies. But can we produce anything original and relevant? It seems that we have gone the way the Roman Empire went: we cannot produce a Virgil any more, at best an equivalent of Ausonius.

And there is a reason for that. Literature, the great kind, is all about changing the reader's view of the world. A great novel, a great poem, are not just about an interesting plot or beautiful images. Good literature brings forth a dream: the dream of a different world. And that dream changes the reader, makes her different. But, in order to perform this deed, the reader must be able to dream of a change. He must live in a society where it is possible, theoretically at least, to put dreams into practice. This is not always the case.

In the Roman Empire of the 4th and 5th century AD, the dream was gone. The Romans had retreated behind their fortifications and had sacrificed everything - including their freedom - in the name of their security. Poetry had become merely praising the rulers of the day, philosophy the compilation of previous works, and history a mere chronicle. Something like that is happening to us: where have our dreams gone?

But it is also true that man doesn't live by bread alone. We need
dreams as much as we need food. And dreams are something that Art can
bring to us, in the form of literature or other forms; it doesn't
matter. It is the power of dreams that can never disappear. If the Roman Literature had disappeared as an original source of dreams, it could still work as a vehicle for dreams coming from outside the empire. From the Eastern Border of the Empire, the cults of Mitrha and of Christ would make deep inroads into the Roman minds. In the early 5th century, in a southern provincial town besieged by barbarians, Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, completed his "The City of God", a book that we still read today and that changed forever the concept of narrative, perhaps the first novel - in the modern sense - ever written. A few centuries later, when the Empire was nothing more than a ghostly memory, an unknown poet composed the Beowulf and, later still, the Nibelungenlied appeared. During this period, tales about a warlord of Britannia started to appear and would later coalesce into the Arthurian cycle, perhaps the core of our modern vision of epic literature.

So, the dream is not dead. Somewhere, at the edges of the empire, or perhaps outside of it, someone is dreaming a beautiful dream (**). Maybe she will write it down in a remote language, or maybe she will use the Imperial Language. Maybe he will use a different medium than the written word; we cannot say. What we can say is that, one day, this new dream will change the world.

(*) A brief comment on Dutintsev's novel, which I
bought and read in an English translation as a little exercise in
cultural archeology. Read more than half a century after its release, it
is difficult to see it as still "sensational" as it was described at
that time in the Western press, which had clearly tried to cash an easy
propaganda victory against the Soviet Union. As a novel, it is slow and
overdrawn, although that may be a result of the Internet-caused attention deficit
which affects most of us. In any case, the novel has defects. One is
the protagonist, Dmitri Lopatkin, so heavily characterized as a perfect
altruist to make him totally unbelievable as a real world person. But
the book is still charming in its description of a Moscow, which is no
more, but which remains perfectly recognizable, even though so much
changed today. To see the characters of the book in action, you can
watch the movie made in 2005. I already commented a short story by Dudintsev in this post.

(**) From a group of remote islands known as Japan, a man has been producing one masterpiece movie after another; Hayao Miyazaki. To understand the decline of the Western forms of narrative, you have just to compare two animation movies which came out together in 2014: the nearly ignored "The wind rises" by Miyazaki and the blockbuster "Frozen" by Walt Disney Studios. It is like comparing Augustine and Ausonius and the ongoing collapse of the Western Empire is all there.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Monument building cycle of the Mayan civilization. From "Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, The Ancient Maya, Third
Edition (Stanford University Press, 1956), page 66.". Courtesy of Diego Mantilla.

Once you give a name to a phenomenon, you can focus your attention on it and learn more and more about it. So, the "Seneca Cliff" idea turns out to be a fruitful one. It tells us that, in several cases, the cycle of exploitation of a natural resource follows a forward skewed curve, where decline is much faster than growth. This is consistent with what the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote: "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." With some mathematical tricks, the result is the following curve:

This curve describes the behavior of several complex systems, including entire civilizations which experienced an abrupt collapse after a long period of relatively slow growth. In my first post on the seneca cliff, I already discussed the collapse of the Mayan Civilization (*)

Here, you can see the the Seneca behavior, although the data for the Maya population density seem to be rather qualitative and uncertain. However, the data that I received recently from Diego Mantilla (see at the beginning of this post) are clear: if you take monument building as a proxy for the wealth of the Mayan civilization, then the collapse was abrupt, surely faster than growth.

So, the Mayans didn't do better than other civilizations in human history. As other civilizations did, they moved toward their demise by dragging their feet, trying to avoid the unavoidable. They didn't succeed and they didn't realize that opposing the collapse in this way is a classic example of "pushing the levers in the wrong direction". It can only postpone collapse, but in the end makes it more rapid.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

As far as Saudi Arabia and its motives, that is very simple
also. The Saudis are good at money and arithmetic. Faced with the
painful choice of losing money maintaining current production at
$60/barrel or taking 2 million barrels per day off the market and losing
much more money—it’s an easy choice: take the path that is less
painful. If there are secondary reasons like hurting U.S. tight oil
producers or hurting Iran and Russia, that’s great, but it’s really just
about the money.

I think that Berman may very well be right; the Saudi really reasoned in these terms. They wanted to reduce their losses and keep their market share.

But think about that for a moment: was it really a smart move for the Saudis?

Saudi Arabia produces little in addition to oil; its economy is heavily based on oil. And even for food, Saudi Arabia must rely on revenues from oil in order to import food. And even for the mighty Saudi Arabia, oil resources are not infinite.

So, assume you have the power to regulate oil production in Saudi Arabia, what would you do? Logically, you would think that it is silly to keep pumping oil at full speed when it has become so cheap. You would reason that it is a good idea to keep as much as possible of it underground, to use when it will be really rare and expensive. In addition, your competitors will run out of oil when you still have plenty of it; wouldn't that be nice?

Logic? Sure, but only if you think long term. If you think only of the near term profit, then it makes sense to sell all what you have, when you have it. And the future? Well, that will be someone else's problem.

Unfortunately, it is not just in Saudi Arabia that they think in this way.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

As I said in a previous post of mine, strong price oscillations are expected at or near the production peak. Prices can go up and down, but the drops don't last for long and the overall trend is clear: it goes up. Graph by Frances Coppola.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

"The Great Transition", a recent book by Mauro Bonaiuti; an economist, presently teaching at the University of Torino, in Italy. With this book, he tackles several themes well known to those who study the interplay of resource depletion, pollution, and economic growth (and de-growth). Among these, the effects of overpopulation, decline in EROEI, environmental degradation and more. He adds, however, the economist's point of view in examining how the economy of a post-growth society could be organized. The book has been extensively reviewed by Nafeez Ahmed. Here are some excerpts from Ahmed's article; you can read the whole text on "Motherboard"

The End of Endless Growth: Part 1

Some argue that even as the economy descends into madness, the seeds of hope are being planted. Even as global crises are
accelerating—encompassing
the risk of climate catastrophe, energy instability, and many others in
addition to economic breakdown—a range of interconnected systemic
revolutions are converging in a way that could facilitate a positive
transformation of the global economy: from one that maximizes material
accumulation for the few, to one that caters for the needs and well
being of all.
That’s the conclusion of a major new book published as part of the Routledge
Studies in Ecological Economics series, The Great Transition,
by Mauro Bonaiuti, an economist at the University of Turin in Italy.
Bonaiuti’s book applies the tools of complexity science to diagnose the
real dynamic and implications of the global economic crisis that most
visibly erupted in 2008.

That crisis, Bonaiuti argues, is a symptom of a longer “passage of
civilization.” Advanced capitalist societies are in a “phase of
declining returns” measured across the period after the Second World
War, including GDP growth, energy return on investment (how much energy
is put in compared to what we get out), and manufacturing productivity,
among others.

Bonaiuti’s graph of GDP growth rate in Europe from 1961 to 2011, illustrating a fluctuating but consistent long decline.

....

For Bonaiuti, the declining returns are a consequence of the “the
interaction between limitations of a biophysical nature (the exhaustion
of resources, global warming, etc.) and the increasing complexity of
social structures (bureaucratisation, the reduction in the productivity
of innovation and in the educational, health and productive systems,
etc.).”

....

Civilization is thus undergoing a huge, momentous phase shift as the
current form of global predatory capitalism crumbles beneath the weight
of its own mounting unsustainability. As this process unfolds, it
simultaneously opens up a range of scenarios for new forms of society,
within which there is an opportunity for “a great transition towards new
institutional forms” that could include greater “democratic
self-government of communities and their territories.”
Despite the very real
disru​ptions this phase shift entails, many of which have been explored in depth here at Motherboard (the unprecedented spate of global unrest being a major example), the Italian economist is cautiously optimistic about the potential long-term outcomes.

“When the framework changes, as the sciences of complexity teach us,
there will be other forms of economic and social organization more
suited to the new situation,” Bonaiuti wrote. “In particular, in a
context of global crisis, or even stagnant growth, cooperation among
decentralized, smaller scale economic organisations, will offer greater
chances of success. These organizations can lead the system towards
conditions of ecological sustainability, more social equity and, by
involving citizens and territories, even increase the level of
democracy.”

.....

If Bonauiti is right, then even as conventional economic tools turn out
to be increasingly impotent, we should expect to see more and more
signs of this changing framework, and with it, the emergence of
potential new forms of economic and social organization that work far
better than the old industrial paradigm we take for granted.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

.....

That’s not to say any of this will happen in a simplistic, easy-peasy
manner. Bonauiti identifies four potential scenarios for the future, and
one of them involves “collapse”—which somewhat speaks for itself. Those
who benefit from the old paradigm are likely to resist the most. Quite
literally, the future of our species and the planet will be defined by
the entirely unpredictable way people everywhere might respond to the
reality of change, whether through resistance, disbelief, apathy,
engagement, adaption, or action.

So welcome to 2015: a year when our choices could determine the future of the planet.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

The graph above was created by Gail Tverberg on her blog "Our Finite World". It is, clearly, another case of what I called the "Seneca Cliff" (from the Roman philospher who said "the road to ruin is rapid). The Seneca Cliff takes this shape, when generated by a system dynamics model:

Gail's forecast of the future of energy production is not the result of a the same model I developed, but the reasons behind the steep decline are the same. Gail explains it in a post of hers as:

All parts of our economy are interconnected. If parts of the economy
is becoming increasingly inefficient, more than the cost of production
in these parts of the economy are affected; other parts of the economy
are affected as well, including wages, debt levels, and interest rates.

Wages are especially being crowded out, because the total amount of
goods and services available for purchase in the world economy is
growing more slowly. This is not intuitively obvious, unless a person
stops to realize that if the world economy is growing more slowly, or
actually shrinking, it is producing less. Each worker gets a share of
this shrinking output, so it is reasonable to expect inflation-adjusted
wages to be stagnating or declining, since a stagnating or declining
collection of goods and services is all a person can expect.

At some point, something has to “give”.

Which is a good description of the mathematical modelat the basis of the Seneca cliff idea. The burden on the economy of increasing costs becomes more and more heavy in times of diminishing returns (or, as Gail says, increasing inefficiency, which is the same). At some point, something "gives" and the whole thing comes down. Seneca rules.

Overexploitation typically generates the "Hubbert curve," the name given to a bell-shaped production cycle best known for the case of crude oil, but affecting all the resources which can be exploited faster than they can reform by natural processes. This behavior can be explained by means of mathematical models, but, qualitatively, it is the result of the falling profits generated by the diminishing resource stock. In the long run, lower profits discourage investments and the result is a general production decline. A particular case of this mechanism is when the industry initially reacts to diminishing returns by aggressively increasing the amount of capital invested. In this case, the stocks of the resource are depleted very fast and the result is a crash of the production rate; we still have a bell shaped curve, but skewed forward. The rapid decline that occurs after the peak is what I called the "Seneca Cliff."

There are several historical examples of the Seneca cliff; in the case of fisheries, it is especially evident in the case of the Canadian cod fishery and for the Caspian Sturgeon; but it is evident also in the case of the UK fishing industry. Note, in the figure above, the steep decline of the landings of the late 1970s, it is significantly steeper than the growth of the left side of the curve. This is the essence of the Seneca mechanism. And we can see very well what causes it: the start of the decline in production corresponds to a rapid growth of investments. The result is the increase of what the authors of the paper call "fishing power" - an estimate of the efficiency and size of the fishing fleet.

The results were disastrous; a textbook example of how to "push the levers in the wrong directions", that is, of a case when the attempt to solve a problem worsens it considerably. In this case, the more efficient the fishing fleet was, the more rapidly the fish stock was destroyed. This is a classic mechanism for falling down the Seneca cliff: the more efficient you are at exploiting a non renewable (or slowly renewable) resource, the faster you deplete it. And the faster you get into trouble.

This case, as others, is such a staggering disaster that one wonders how it was possible at all. How could it be that nobody in the fishing industry or in the government realized what was happening? In their article on this subject, Thurstan and his colleagues don't comment on this point, but we can cite an article by Hamilton et al. on the Canadian Atlantic Cod fishery, where they say "Some say they saw trouble coming, but felt powerless to halt it." That seems to be not describing not just the fishing industry, but our entire civilization.

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted: how the quest for mineral resources is plundering the Planet" (Chelsea Green 2014). His most recent book is "The Seneca Effect" to be published by Springer in mid 2017

Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog is dedicated to exploring the future of humankind, affected by the decline of the availability of natural resources, the climate problem, and the human tendency of mismanaging both. The future doesn't look bright, but it is still possible to do something good if we don't discount the alerts of the modern Cassandras. (and don't forget that the ancient prophetess turned out to be always right).

Above: Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Extracted

A report to the Club of Rome published by Chelsea Green. (click on image for a link)

Rules of the blog

I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it